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The Asch building, a 10-story building in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village, was home to the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory. Its employees, mostly immigrant women, worked long hours sewing shirtwaists—a term for women’s blouses—in the overcrowded and poorly ventilated sweatshop, and received low wages.

On the 10th floor, workers escaped to the roof where they were able to climb across to the roof of another building; just one of the roughly 70 10th floor workers died. On the ninth floor, however, workers were surrounded by the blaze.

Some workers were able to escape, but the only unlocked stairway was soon blocked by flames and the elevator stopped functioning. The lone fire escape collapsed under the weight of fleeing workers, leaving the remaining workers with no escape.

Some chose to jump rather than burn alive. From the roof, cashier Joseph Fletcher watched “my girls, my pretty ones, going down through the air. They hit the sidewalk spread out and still.”

“Every available ambulance in Manhattan was called upon to cart the dead to the morgue bodies charred to unrecognizable blackness or reddened to a sickly hue—as was to be seen by shoulders or limbs protruding through flame-eaten clothing,” wrote a reporter for the New York World. “Men and women, boys and girls were of the dead that littered the street; that is actually the condition—the streets were littered.”

The city was horrified and outraged by the fire, and the International Ladies Garment Workers Union led people into the streets to protest the conditions that resulted in the tragedy. “It will perhaps be discovered that someone was too eager to make money out of human energy to provide the proper safeguards,” declared a reverend at a local church.

Triangle owners Isaac Harris and Max Blanck were indicted for manslaughter for failing to provide adequate fire safety measures and locking a stairway door that could have saved many lives. They were found not guilty, much to the dismay of the public.

“To many, its horrors epitomize the extremes of industrialism,” writes the Cornell University Kheel Center for Labor-Management Documentation. “The tragedy still dwells in the collective memory of the nation and of the international labor movement. The victims of the tragedy are still celebrated as martyrs at the hands of industrial greed.”

The Cornell University Kheel Center for Labor-Management Documentation, in conjunction with the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees, presents a Web site “designed to provide an easily used resource to assist in the writing of class papers” on the Triangle Shirtwaist fire. It includes an overview of the main events with links to primary source material, such as newspaper articles, witness accounts and songs. It also features photographs, audio and a list of victims.